Laundry Room Part: 1 with Sketchup

 

This laundry room project has been a doozy, but I have taught myself new skills so that’s what really matters as we move forward, right?

First I measured everything in the room and taught myself, with the help of some youtube videos, how to use sketchup.
Sketchup is a free web-based program powered by google that allows you to create plans in 3D. Everything is constructed with a basic square that you can pull out to be three dimensional. It’s pretty cool and super helpful in determining what dimensions I should use when building my cabinets.

As I drew the boxes I made them to scale of my actual exciting laundry room so I could see what space I had left for additional cabinets.

Here’s a picture of the before laundry room:

Our laundry room is surrounded by two bedrooms and backed by a closet so it has zero natural light. Currently the walls are painted Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter and the cabinets are Benjamin Moore Hale Navy.
My biggest problem with our laundry room is the lack of space for dirty clothes and sorting. Since my kids are little we clothes are constantly piling on the floor right by the laundry room door and its a DISASTER. In order to solve that problem I wanted to build a laundry basket tower to hold separated dirty clothes/clean cloths and a hamper for EASY tossing in hopes to eliminate the whole “clothes all over the floor” problem.

The other problem is the laundry room feels tight. Our dryer sicks up 4″ further than our cabinets and gives a whopping 1″ of clearance for our door to open and close. My hope is with building a laundry basket tower that is in line with the cabinet and stacking the washer and dryer that it will make it feel less tight.

Lastly we need a decent sized space to hang clothes to dry. We don’t necessarily need the whole laundry room to be full of upper cabinets, so we came up with some float shelves and a black rod hanging down.

SHIPLAP VS TILE: my husband and I have been going back and forth about the backsplash. He is sold on shiplap. We even went to Lowes with the intention to buy it… and I chickened out and spent the rest of the night looking up tile.

If you are a visual person like me and need to see the FINAL product before you start try playing around with sketchup.

here are some videos that are helpful for beginners:
Video 1
Video 2